Scot Wingo's eBay Blog
In addition to discussing eBay strategies, Scot will provide his take on the latest eBay related news.

December 03, 2013

Holiday 2013 - Cyber Monday and Cyber Five FINAL

We've moved our blog! EbayStrategies.blogs.com will eventually be shut down, however the posts will live on. To access this blog post at its new location, click here.

Note: This is a regular feature published by ChannelAdvisor highlighting the Same Store Sales (SSS) across our wide range of thousands of retailers and billions in GMV. Details on the SSS including background, methodology, disclaimers and schedule can be found in this post. Our detailed Holiday 2013 schedule can be found here.

Conference call today

FYI Bob Peck (Analyst at Sun Trust) is hosting a Holiday 2013 update today (December 3, 2013) at 11am ET and he has graciously offered for blog readers to be able to attend:

I hope you are able to make it and feel free to ask questions on the data you have been seeing in these updates.

Today we are releasing our FINAL Cyber Monday and Cyber Five data. The following Cyber Five table summarizes where we are in the key holiday days so far (date aligned to last year):

Cyber Monday - Not just for work any more!

The most interesting thing we saw for Cyber Monday isn't in the chart, but we saw it in our intra-day data. Historically Cyber Monday has been a 'work-day weighted' day - meaning that the bulk of traffic/sales came in during the key 11-5pm timeframe. This year, the same trend started (really ramped up at 11am when both East and West coast are online) , but the difference was the day sustained well into the evening hours (midnight ET!). A couple of things we observed that played a role in this:

Many retailers released Cyber Monday deals in waves, effectively extending the promotional excitement.

Devices definitely played a role here (Couch Commerce or Bed Commerce) where we saw computer follow the old trend and tablet/smartphone fill in after - this supports the overall theory that these devices have some level of incrementality to desktop vs. cannibalization as some have feared/suggested.

Anecdotal -> The NFL Monday Night game was one of the most significant of the year (Go Seahawks!), and I imagine many US households were up late watching that with a lot of folks using the commercials/downtime to complete their Cyber Monday shopping.

Now all that being said, here's what this looks like from our perspective: (click to enlarge)

Cyber Monday and Five Channel Observations:

Amazon - Amazon is off to a strong holiday. The key days of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were all over 30% y/y growth which is twice the rate of e-commerce. Amazon was quite savvy managing their promotional calendar and supply/positioning of deals.

eBay - eBay's Cyber Five was also strong coming in at ~30% for the key five days. The intra-day numbers were a bit lumpier than Amazon. eBay definitely cranked up their promotional engine from last year, primarily through the daily deal mechanism. They definitely pulled that trigger the hardest on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Search and CSE came in in-line with e-commerce growth with GS (Google Shopping) showing it's super-sized growth as it continues to take share from Search and CSE.

Here's a look at the marketplace trends through the Cyber Five.

Up next...

On December 5th, we'll have complete November results to get a broader picture of how the holiday is going.